Poems of Paul Celan: A Bilingual German/English Edition - Softcover

Celan, Paul.

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9780892551347: Poems of Paul Celan: A Bilingual German/English Edition

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0892551348 ISBN 13: 9780892551347

Publisher: Persea Books, 1989

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This peerless edition, first published in 1980, remains the English- language standard for the poetry of Paul Celan, the Holocaust's most haunting, and haunted, voice.

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Review:

George Steiner has declared, "The quality of aloneness in Celan is pitiless." Paul Celan's hermetic, Holocaust-haunted works call out to us and then resort to difficulty, private language, and--in the late art--splintering and silence. Celan, who committed suicide in 1970, was born in Romania and wrote in a German taut with archetypes, archaisms, and neologisms, which has both frustrated and inspired fellow poets and translators. Michael Hamburger has been more daring than most. Laboring on a dual-language selection, he had to resort to biographical clues to unravel entire poems; he bluntly states that "much of Celan's later poetry can be intuitively grasped, but not rendered in another language, without as much knowledge as possible of his sources.... What makes them difficult is the terrain itself--a terrain in which milk is black, death is the all-encompassing reality--not the nature of its charting."

The reference is to Celan's most famous work, "Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue"), a poem which grows more harrowing with each reading, particularly the iconic lines "death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue / he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true." Hamburger's translation begins:

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon and in the morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink it
we dig a grave in the breezes there lies one unconfined...

Though this is among Celan's more accessible works, most of the poems in Hamburger's volume will reward, and stun, the attentive reader.

About the Author:

Paul Celan (1920–1970) was born Paul Antschel into a Jewish family in Bukovina, a German enclave in Romania which was destroyed by the Nazis. His parents were taken to a concentration camp in 1942, and did not return; Celan managed to escape deportation and to survive. After settling in Paris in 1948, he gained widespread recognition as a poet with the publication of his first collection of poems in German in 1952. His earliest poems were written in Romanian and have been translated by, among others, his friend Nina Cassian. He was a fine translator of poetry, mainly from French, English, Russian and Romanian. His mysterious meeting with Martin Heidegger was the subject of a radio play by John Banville. Michael Hamburger (1924–2007) was a poet and critic of distinction as well as the outstanding translator of German poetry. His awards include the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (1981), the German Federal Republic’s Goethe Medal (1986) and the EC’s first European Translation Prize (1990) for Poems of Paul Celan. Five collections of his poetry appeared since Collected Poems 1941–1994. He also published several collections of essays, the critical study The Truth of Poetry, and an autobiography String of Beginnings. His translations include selections from Celan, Eich, Goethe, Hofmannsthal, H�lderlin, Peter Huchel, Rilke and others.

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